TV Dinners

This bout with shingles has me doing something I swore I would never, never, ever do.  I have been reduced to eating TV dinners!  (Picture head hanging in shame.)  I have no appetite and less energy and the thought of cooking even the simplest of meals it just too daunting.  My question.....is there such a thing as an edible TV dinner?  I am not expecting much.  Just something that resembles what is pictured on the box and does not look and taste like cat food on the plate.

There seems to be a tremendous demand for this stuff, judging from the freezer sections at the supermarkets, so you would think that some of it must be more palatable than the samples I have tried.

The illustrations look quite appetizing.  For instance:

Salisbury steak..... a nice juicy little hamburger patty with mashed potatoes and  a small serving of corn.  Reality.....a chunk of some sort of spongy mystery meat.  The potatoes are usually OK and corn is corn.  So I had mashed potatoes and corn for dinner.
Chicken pot pie....golden and yummy-looking, with a little sauce oozing out of the crispy pastry topping.  Reality.....a puddle of white sauce with a few coins of under-done carrots and a pea or two, and here and there cubes of some sort of white (and spongy) substance that I guess is the advertised chicken.  True, the pastry is nice and crispy but does not make for a satisfying meal.
Swedish meatballs......I should know better.
Sweet and sour chicken.....cubes of white-meat chicken, peppers, rice, some pineapple, just the ticket for a light meal.    Reality....what do they do to that chicken to turn it into inedible chunks of sponge?  I know I keep using that word, but it is the only one I can think of that describes the texture and taste of this stuff.  It does not resemble chicken in the slightest way, just as the slab of "Salisbury steak" had  no relation of any hamburger patty I have ever eaten.

The shelves are full of packaged dinners, just waiting to be reconstituted with a little water in your microwave, and the freezers are jammed with frozen dinners of all sorts.  Surely, among them there must be some choices that are acceptable?  Not as a steady diet, but just as a stop-gap to get one over the rough spots. Any suggestions, dear friends? 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

A charming first novel about  a small English village trying to cope with the influx of foreign-born and, to the insular inhabitants of this village, sometimes outlandish, people.  The protagonist of this narrative is Major Ernest Pettigrew, a retired Army Major.  He is a very likeable hero from the start.....courtly, wry, dignified,  intelligent....the very epitome of the  best in the British character.  The village is populated with a mix of people who are somewhat reminiscent of the folks in the Lucia books, transplanted to today's world.  The story revolves around the friendship of Major Pettigrew with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani proprietor of a village shop. Small-town- type crises arise, petty rivalries abound, snobbery as only the British can do snobbery,  all leading to a happy ending for the Major and Mrs. Ali.  A gentle book, humorous without being comic,  principled without being preachy, a very pleasant summer read.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand     Helen Simonson     Random House

Odds and Ends

I feel like rambling.  Things pop into my head and I just like to put them down for fun.  So the usual product warning:  Quit reading  now if you don't want to be bored.  I am doing this for my own amusement.

There is a question that PAs, nurses, and other medical professionals often ask that I never know how to answer.  If you go in with a pain somewhere, they will ask, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you say it hurts?"   Well, now.   There are some factors involved here, right?   How much is 10?  Is it  agonizing, excruciating pain, or is it "It hurts like hell"?  If 10  is excruciating pain, I would say my knee is maybe a 4 or 5, or on some days, 6.   If  10 is "It hurts like hell", then it is right up there at the top.  I knew a woman who moaned about how painful her mammograms were. Obviously, she had never had a baby.   I knew a man who died in agony from cancer of the sinuses.  When I consider this last,  it puts my knee down to a 1 or 2.  So it is a relative thing and what good does my answer serve?

Another silly TV ad.  Cereal, this time.  A young woman sits in front of a box of nutritious, heart-healthy Choc-O-Puffies.    Flashing a toothy smile, she reaches toward the box and selects a Choc-O-Puffie  from the very top of the box.   Reality check!   Have you ever bought a box of cereal where the contents reached the top of the box?   No, you have not.  You much reach into the box to extract a tasty Choc-O-Puffie.

While I am knocking the TV commercials for the idiotic baloney (old-fashioned term)  that they are,  I will give a nod to some of the dementia treatment ads, which are quite sensitive and realistic.  I am not against advertising.  I am against phoniness.  Show us real people doing real things and maybe we (I) will be more receptive to  your pitches.

A small boy and girl cousin were put into the bath together at their grandmother's summer cottage.  The little girl had never seen a naked boy before and she got quite upset.  "How come", she demanded, "that he's  so fancy and I'm so plain?"

When I was young and for a good time after,  choices  at the markets and drugstores were limited to one or two of each product.  For instance,  I have always used Crest toothpaste.  In the past, if you went into the store to buy a tube of Crest, you picked it up, paid,  and took it home.  There may have been some choices as to tube size, etc. but the product was  the same in all.  Today, Crest toothpaste occupies three shelves at my local market.  Gel or paste?  Toothwhitener?  Plaque control?  Sensitive gums?   Once upon a time, Bayer aspirin was Bayer aspirin.  It eased all kinds of pain.  Nowadays, you can get Bayer aspirin specific for arthritis, heart problems, menstrual distress, "minor aches and pains" and lots of other special situations.  I always wonder.... if I have a headache, will the arthritis pain pill work?  Or if I have both arthritis pain and a headache, must I take a pill for each condition?  How does the pill know which pain it is targeting?   In those days, if aspirin was not your choice, you could get Anacin. That was about it.  We had Minute Maid frozen orange juice.  We had Kellog's Corn Flakes, and Rice Krispies.  We had white rice, and apple cider vinegar.  These days the cereal aisle is 50 feet long and the choices among exotic rice varieties, vinegars, grains of various sorts, and frozen products is staggering.  Of course, it is nice to have all these wonderful (although often unnecessary and redundant) choices, but shopping in the old days sure was a lot simpler.

Mondegreens!!!   Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the "Bronze Lullaby",  Beethoven's "Erotica Symphony", Gershwin's "Rap City in Blue", and my favorite, "Taco Bell's Canon".

Two Good Books

A couple of books I can recommend:

The first one is called "The Forgotten Garden"  by Kate Morton. This is a big, romantic novel and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It concerns a 4-year-old girl, found abandoned on a dock in Australia, adopted by the port master and his wife, and her subsequent efforts to trace her  background and origins.  It spans three generations and two continents and ends with her granddaughter's unraveling the secret of her family and her grandmother's past. Lots of mysterious leads and side stories and a little mild love interest. 

The author jumps from one character and one time period  to another throughout the book, which can be a little disorienting at first.   But once I got acquainted with the people involved and the mysteries surrounding their stories, it did not present a problem for me.  A nice pleasant read, I thought.

And just the sort of escapist literature that I have been indulging in lately.   I find that the older I get, the less inclined I am to tackle books that require much involvement, either mental or emotional.  I have become very cynical about government and the people who "run" it,  and I have witnessed so much violence, hatred and evilness during my lifetime, that I sometimes feel I cannot take in any more.  From a young idealist, believing fervently in the eventual triumph of civilization,   I have evolved into a skeptical old lady who wonders if mankind is going to make it.  Except for the technological marvels, it seems we have not advanced much beyond the Middle Ages.  We still torture and murder and engage in brutal wars and sacrifice our young as though their lives hold no meaning at all.

Which brings me, sort of,  to this next book, which I am going to recommend without having read it.

It is called "Unbroken", by Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote "Seabiscuit".  It is about  Louis Zamperini, an Army Air Forces bombardier and champion Olympic runner, and and his experiences in WWll.  I did, in fact, get quite far into the book and then reached a stage where I could not continue.  Louis' plane was shot down and he became a wartime prisoner and I simply could not read another account of the atrocities and sufferings of young men at the hand of brutal prison guards and the ordeals they underwent during those terrible years.

Louis survived and lived to a ripe old age.  The book is well-researched with many pages of notes and a large index, and quite a few photos.  My impression from the portion  that I read was that it was a very informative, interesting, scholarly book and well worth the time of anyone who is interested in this period  in history.  In fact, a very good book. Wish I could have read it all.

The Forgotten Garden    Kate Morton    Washington Square Press
 Unbroken      Laura Hillenbrand        Random House

Who you callin' grumpy?

I am getting to be a grouchy, testy, crabby, grumpy old lady and you kids had better stay off my lawn if you know what's good for you!

Lots of things set me off:  TV ads are high on the list.   Here's the middle-aged gentleman consulting his doctor about whatever middle-aged gentlemen consult their doctors about.  The doctor nods gently and reassuringly and the middle-aged gentleman smiles in relief. They shake hands and then the doctor and the patient stroll down the hall together, chatting amiably!  Oh, sure.  When is the last time your doctor walked you to the elevator?  If your experience is the same as mine, the answer is "never."  You clutch the prescription for your $200 bottle of pills and you hightail it out of there while the nurse is already calling the next patient.

Here's the latest wonder drug,  Formaldehyedroxin.  Cures just about everything.  The ad is full of happy, healthy-looking people whose symptoms have been cleared up after years of suffering.  However........Do not take Formaldehyedroxin if your skin should turn green, if you suddenly gain 100 pounds,  or if your fingernails start to drop off.  Call your doctor if you notice that you have blood pouring out of your ears or if you become blind or have out-of-body experiences.  Ask your doctor if Formaldehyedroxin is right for you!!

 Erectile dysfunction (or ED, as the drug companies like to call it) ads can be a hoot.  What do  you do when that "right moment" strikes?  Well, instead of heading upstairs and tumbling into bed like most people, the folks in the ads get dolled up, go out to dinner and a show, or maybe stroll out in the woods and build a campfire.  It occurs to me that the 4-hour erections  that the ads warn against might come in handy in these situations.

Then there are the food ads.  Usually, when you put  something in your mouth it takes a moment or two for the taste buds to register the sensation and the brain to process what is going on.  But not on TV!  As soon as the spoon touches the lips, a beatific expression of bliss and delight hits the face of the recipient.  Same with digestive aids and pain pills.  Pop that antacid pill and before  you can swallow it....blessed relief from  that acid reflux that's been keeping you awake at night!  My experience is that a pain pill takes a little while to do its work, but in the TV ads, not so.  Before it has had a chance to dissolve,  the subject is dancing, picking up the toddler, trotting up the stairs, biking around the block.

Drives me crazy.

It doesn't have to be that way.  There is a lovely ad  on TV with a man walking his Spaniel on the beach, meeting some neighbors out with their dogs, chatting for awhile and walking on, just as any of us might do.  Natural and believable, and the pitch for the drug advertised is just as forceful as any of those other ads.

I am a person of very limited imagination.  I do not like magic shows, fantasy or science fiction.  As a child, I hated Alice in Wonderland,  Peter Pan, the Arabian Nights, and Aesop's Fables.   I like things to be realistic, every-day,  plausible.  I cannot suspend belief and pretend that fabulous, unlikely things can happen.  My loss, I know.  But we are what we are.

 I could go on, as I have a tendency to do, but I will shut up before I get started on the movies.  Or  telemarketers.  Or politicians. Or computers.

 Didn't I tell you kids to stay off my lawn?

The Trailer Park

When it became apparent that a four bedroom, three-bath house on one-half acre of landscaped grounds was getting a little beyond our ability to cope, Erik and I decided to look for a smaller place.  We wanted to be close to where we were, since our life had been centered there for so many years. It was at the start of the real estate boom, so our property was increasing in value, but so was every one else's.  Our realtor, a friend and former neighbor, showed us (or rather, me, since Erik was not really able to handle the climbing in and out of cars, etc.)  a succession of unsuitable and unpromising prospects.  We put down a deposit on a very nice unit in Rossmoor, the local retirement community, but then Erik got into a dispute with the management over some modifications we wanted to make, so we kept looking.

One day, while poring over the Real Estate For Sale columns, I ran across an ad for a mobile home.  I had never actually been inside a mobile home, but it sounded perfect!  3 bedrooms,  a fireplace, spacious kitchen, in a nice development where someone else did all the landscape work.

Some obstacles presented themselves: (1) It was quite far from our center and(2) my husband was NOT GOING TO LIVE IN A TRAILER!

After some persuasion, he agreed to call the agent and at least have a look.  As it turned out, she had another listing closer to home we might like to see.  Well, OK,  (sigh) if I have to, I'll go see it, but I am not going to like it.........Mmmmm, not bad.  Not what I expected.  Quite nice, in fact.  How much is the listing, again?

And thus we ended up in beautiful Brookview Park where we spent 15 happy years in our comfortable, roomy, and I think, very attractive mobile home.

Mobile home owners are very sensitive to the terms "trailer" and "trailer park".  We were constantly reminding people that although our home had been pre-assembled elsewhere and trucked in, it was sitting on its own permanent foundation and was not a "trailer" or a "unit" or a "coach", but a real house.  Hard habit to break, though.  And a wonderful source of bad jokes.  (Erika moaned:  How am I ever going to tell my friends that my folks have sold their beautiful Alamo home and moved into a trailer park?  Haha.)

But, oh, the luxury of having someone else trim the bushes, tend to the pool, plant the flowers!  All we had to do was enjoy.  Our last few years in Alamo were a constant battle with so-called "gardeners".  Once I left a big tall weed near the patio just as a test.  It was there for weeks.  Once, when I was resting on my bed, I heard voices outside on the patio and when I checked, there were two of my "mow- blow- and -go" gang stretched out on the lawn chairs having a nice chat.  They were quite surprised when I appeared.

I now live in another mobile home in Lakeport on a lagoon that stretches in from Clear Lake.  This house has had kind of a hard life, I think, doors a little crooked, floors a little slanted. A cake baked in the oven will be a bit higher on one side than the other.  We bought it on the spur of the moment just months before Erik died.  I think if he had been himself and in good health it would have driven him crazy to live here because nothing is "plumb".  My kids will tell you that, to their Dad, being  "plumb" was next to godliness as a virtue.  But I am very happy here, it is airy, bright and comfortable and I am willing to overlook my little house's eccentricities to be near my family (some of 'em, anyway!) and to enjoy the abundant bird life on the lake and the wonderful clear air and beauty of Lake County.

And I am definitely not living in a trailer.

Decoration Day

When I was a  young girl, we went every Memorial Day (Decoration Day, back then) to put flowers on the graves of our departed ones.  The flowers came from our gardens, no one ever bought hothouse flowers from the florist shops.  It was too late for the snowballs and lilacs, and too early for the dahlias, but my grandmother's peonies were at their peak and my aunt always had armloads of Madonna lilies and there were roses and irises and other early summer bloomers.  We would fill buckets and jars and pile them into the car and then Auntie Dimp, the World's Worst Driver, would get behind the wheel and we would take off in a series of neck-cracking lurches and jerks as she released the clutch.  Quite often she would kill the engine and have to start all over.  But eventually we made it to the local cemetery.

We did not have many graves to decorate in those days.  My sister, Thelma, who died at the age of 22 of pneumonia, and my Uncle Lee.  He was struck by a car late one night while crossing the street in Vancouver.  I always figured he was drunk, but whether I surmised this or picked it up from the whispers of the older members of the family, I don't remember.  He was a World War I veteran of the campaigns in France and returned home as so many young men did then, as now, damaged and anchorless. (As a side note, many years later, after my father's death,  my mother married Tom Crable, Lee's wartime buddy.)  In addition to those two, there were a few neighbors and friends.

It was not long before the graves in our family began to add up.  My grandfather, my grandmother and  my father.  Followed by the aunts and uncles and then the cousins, one by one.  My brother and sister.   My nephews.  A baby grand-nephew.  Today, except for four elderly cousins, I am the only remaining member of my generation on either side of my family.  Having good genes and living a long life has its pluses, but the minuses are many.

For many years, after I moved far away,  I sent money to my sister to buy some of  those hothouse flowers to put on the graves.  Today, it would take a truckload of blossoms to honor the resting places of my family.  Not only in the little local cemetery, which has grown into many acres, but scattered in graveyards all over Clark county, where most of them lived and died.

As  a child, I don't remember the patriotic and military aspects of this holiday.  We had not been in so many wars then.   I suppose there were parades and celebrations in the towns but we lived far out in the country and I think the height of our holidaying was the usual huge family pot-luck at the home of one of the relatives. 

Memorial Day has a whole new meaning to me now than it did in those far-off days. Members of my family have been to war and I have lost a friend in battle.  Our country is much more belligerent than it was then and we are engaged in conflicts of  doubtful merit.  But my heart is with the young men and women who  fight these battles and I am filled with admiration for their services.   While I remember my loved ones as I always have on this day,  I add the thousands of brave warriors who have died in combat in far-off lands  and I hope and wish that their sacrifices will be worthy of the courage they displayed.